The state House of Representatives is poised to vote on Thursday on a bill that calls for the state to borrow up to $90 million to help counties defray the cost of buying new voting machines.

The bill, which has the state picking up 60 percent of a county’s tab, also includes some election reforms. The most significant reform: the bill would eliminate the straight-ticket voting option in general elections.

Senate Appropriations Committtee Pat Browne, R-Lehigh County, said the majority Republicans have not yet discussed the legislation as a caucus and haven’t committed to it.

Providing the funding to help cover the cost of voting machine replacement has been a major concern to county commissioners since Gov. Tom Wolf last year ordered all of the state’s voting machines to be de-certified by the end of this year. He wants them replaced with ones that have a verifiable paper trail by no later than next year’s presidential primary.

The cost of replacing the machines was estimated between $93 million and $150 million, according to the Department of State. House Appropriations Committee Stan Saylor, R-York County, said the money the state is borrowing won’t be available until 2020-21, but "we just wanted to make sure the county commissioners had that assurance they were receiving dollars.”

This left county commissioners in a bind. Their statewide association identified getting some state funding to pay for this mandate as their number one legislative priority. Wolf proposed in his budget providing $15 million this year to assist counties with this expense with a promise of picking up half the cost over five years.

“That means the counties would have had to carry loans at pretty hefty interest rates of 18 to 20 percent over that five-year period,” said Sen. John Gordner, R-Columbia County, who led the charge in making this mandate more manageable for counties. “That’s why we came up with the $90 million and the state, through getting good rates on bonding, will be able to carry that load better than counties.”

Doug Hill, executive director of the County Commissioners of Pennsylvania, was pleased with the legislation that will provide assistance to counties, regardless of whether they already purchased their new machines or have yet to buy them.

“What it means is it reduces the cost to the local property taxpayer," he said Wednesday evening.

Between the money this bill provides and the $14.1 million the federal government already provided to Pennsylvania, Gordner said he is hoping counties have enough resources of their own to cover the remainder of the bill.

While the concern about the voting machine replacement was shared by Republican and Democratic lawmakers alike, Democrats on the House Appropriations Committee opposed the bill when it was being considered Wednesday evening.

House Democratic Appropriations Committee Matt Bradford of Montgomery County explained their dissent rested solely on the bill’s inclusion of the elimination of straight-ticket voting.

With a presidential election coming up, he said it would lead to voter confusion at the polls and cause longer lines of people waiting to cast their ballot since voters will no longer have the option of pushing one button to vote straight ticket.

“We shouldn’t be changing the rules in the middle of the game,” Bradford said.

The bill also provides for a process that must be followed the next time a governor decides to decertify voting machines in at least half of the counties. It also would reduce the number of ballots that counties would have to print to 10 percent more than the highest number of ballots cast in the three previous comparable primaries or general elections. And it would alter some absentee ballot deadlines.

*This story has been updated to include Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Pat Browne’s comments about the measure.